Computer servers provide access to a plethora of services, many of which are supplied over a network and on-demand in a cloud computing environment. In general, cloud computing environments allow for developing scalable applications in which computing resources are utilized to support efficient execution of the applications.
Organizations and businesses that develop, provide, or otherwise maintain cloud-based applications have become accustomed to relying on these services and implementing various types of environments, from complex web sites to data mining systems and much more. However, there is a challenge as greater reliance is made on such systems, since such systems have to maintain a very high up-time and any failure may become highly problematic and/or costly to a user of the system. That is, there is a requirement to allow for business continuity. For example, for an e-commerce application executed in a cloud-based environment, any downtime of such application means revenue and/or good will lost. As a result, providers of such applications often utilize measures to ensure continuity of operations by backing up information that is relevant to maintaining operations.
Some backup and restoration solutions, discussed in the related art, attempt to initialize a replicated machine in place of an original machine. A machine can be a physical machine (e.g., a server) or a virtual machine hosted by a physical machine. Such solutions may require significant down time when switching from the original machine to the replicated machine, and then again when switching back to operating with the original machine after data has accumulated in the replicated machine which does not exist in the original machine. This may require manual modifications to account for differences between the original machine and the replicated machine. For example, when a machine allocated in the cloud-environment for execution of the application includes certain firewall configuration parameters, these parameters have to be copied manually to the respective backup machine if the user or provider desires that such parameters be identical in character to those of the backed-up machine.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a solution to improve the deficiencies of the prior art.